The Art of Preservation
From Iraq to Syria to Haiti and elsewhere, Cori Wegener works to preserve and recover important cultural artifacts following wars and natural disasters
By Rick Davis
Cori Wegener couldn’t believe her eyes when she entered the National Museum of Iraq in May 2003.
And not because of the beautiful art and sculptures she was seeing.
“Many of the pieces were still smashed on the floor,” Wegener recalls.
About a month earlier, coalition forces had toppled the capital city of Baghdad as part of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The smashed pieces were the result of 36 hours of looting and mayhem prior to the advance of U.S. forces on Baghdad.
Wegener was there on deployment with the Army Reserve, 352nd Civil Affairs Command, as the arts, monuments and archives officer. She served as a liaison with officials from the Iraqi Ministry of Culture.
“They needed help with conservation planning, and they were working to stabilize things,” Wegener says. “All the doors had been damaged. They stole all the furniture, even piping. Really basic things needed to be stabilized. They were just getting generators going so they could have a little bit of power and electricity.
“It was pretty awful.”
Her first order of business was to work with Iraqi officials to develop an inventory of what was missing. It was a daunting task. Thankfully, she says, museum staff had hidden thousands of artifacts in a secret storage space prior to the looting.
Eventually, it was estimated that thieves had plundered 15,000 objects. One of the more significant items missing was the famous Mask of Warka, a marble carving dating to 3100 B.C. that is believed to be one of the earliest representations of the human face.
Wegener still remembers the call she received from the U.S. military police.
“I heard you’re the museum lady,” the MP said. “I think we found the head of Warka.”
“I said, ‘Oh, my God, that’s so great!’” Wegener says. “Where is it? How are you taking care of it?”
“Oh, so this is important?” the MP replied.
“Oh my, it’s one of the most important pieces of ancient art,” Wegener blurted back.
“OK, I’ll tell the boys to stop passing it around out back.”
After a few heart-stopping beats, he added, “Relax, ma’am, I’m kidding. We’ll bring it to the museum tomorrow.”
Acting on a tip, the U.S. military raided a farm north of Baghdad and found the piece buried in about six inches of dirt. It was returned in perfect shape, and the artifact is now back on display in the Iraq Museum.
“This is the Mona Lisa of Iraq!” Wegener says. “It was a moment when we needed some good news. It was so exciting.”
Career alchemy
For Wegener, her time in Iraq was the perfect blend of her military experience, her studies at UNO in political science, and her professional career as a museum curator. Wegener, who also holds master’s degrees in political science and art history from the University of Kansas, was working as the associate curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Art when she was called to duty in Iraq.
Wegener retired from the military in 2004 as a major, after 22 years of service. A Fremont, Nebraska, native, she was in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps at UNO, where she served as the first female battalion commander and met her husband, UNO graduate Paul Wegener. She graduated from UNO in 1988.
In 2006, Wegener founded the U.S. Committee of the Blue Shield, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the prevention of destruction and theft of cultural heritage worldwide. The blue shield represents the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. Adopted in 1954 following the massive destruction of cultural heritage during World War II, the treaty had yet to be ratified by the U.S.
“Our goal was to get the United States to ratify the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. And we did, in 2009.”
Today, the organization’s goals include raising public awareness about the importance of cultural property to our shared human heritage and coordinating with the U.S. military, government and cultural heritage organizations to protect cultural property worldwide during armed conflict.
Wegener also assisted in the aftermath of the devastating 2010 Haiti earthquake, which, according to figures from the Haitian government, claimed the lives of more than 300,000 people and left more than 1 million homeless. “It was awful,” Wegener recalls. “Everyone I met had lost someone or something that was very important to them.”
But even amidst the devastation, she says, the Haitian people she met were very receptive to trying to save elements of their cultural heritage. Wegener visited Haiti several times in support of the Smithsonian Institution’s Cultural Recovery Project — which helped recover and preserve more than 30,000 objects of Haitian heritage.
She particularly remembers efforts to save historic murals from inside Holy Trinity Cathedral in Port-au-Prince that famously include images of Haitians in depicting the life of Christ.
“The whole church just collapsed,” she says. “There were just a few walls that still had some of these important murals on them. It was a race against time to save them from the elements.
“It was an amazing project. The conservators made a map of how to put all the pieces back together.” Those pieces are now safely in storage.
Still Coming to the Rescue
In 2012, Wegener was named the first director the newly formed Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative, an outreach program dedicated to the preservation of cultural heritage in crisis situations in the U.S. and abroad. Its work includes projects in Syria, Iraq, Haiti and Nepal.
In addition to direct outreach to cultural institutions experiencing crisis, Wegener’s office provides training to military personnel, museum curators, emergency responders and the general public on preservation and recovery best practices, and is collaborating with others at the Smithsonian to map the geolocations of cultural institutions nationally and internationally to improve response times in the event of a crisis.
“I want to make sure that things, such as the looting of the Iraq museum … these things are avoidable if we help people understand.
“In these places where our rich cultural heritage is at risk, it’s a loss for us all if we lose it.”
Other UNO Graduates on the
Frontlines of Cultural Preservation
Jerry Podany
A 1975 UNO graduate who majored in studio art with a minor in art history, Jerry Podany is a former senior conservator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in California, where he worked for 37 years until his retirement in 2016, and former president of the American Institute for Conservation and the International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works. He currently serves as a consultant in the field and is the author of the 2017 book “When Galleries Shake: Earthquake Damage Mitigation for Museum Collections.”
In the mid-1980s, Podany saw a need at the Getty and other museums to better protect their exhibits from the threat of earthquakes.
“We began to work with seismic engineers and geologists, who actually hadn’t thought much about contents in museums,” Podany says. “They were mostly looking at civic structures — buildings, bridges, highways.”
Podany also wanted to maintain exhibit aesthetics and stay away from mountings that would affect the integrity of objects. The solution? Seismic base isolators – “mechanisms that are placed between the object or the pedestal and floor, which basically allow the floor to move and not affect the object. That really changed everything.”
In 1995, Podany was part of an international response team that entered Kobe, Japan, a week after the Great Hanshin earthquake to respond to damage suffered by museum collections.
His archaeological fieldwork has taken him to sites worldwide, including Syria, where he was part of a team that found a 3,000-year-old carbonized basket at the excavation of the ancient city of Terqa; Cyprus, for work on ancient mosaics; Egypt, to study why a piece fell from the Great Sphinx of Giza; and Tanzania, for continued conservation and documentation of fossilized footprints left by early humans some 3.6 million years ago in wet volcanic ash at Laetoli.
“The Laetoli footprints are the first physical evidence of upright walking of hominids,” Podany says. “When you see the actual imprint, in the earth, it’s something very animated and very personal. It was really quite extraordinary.”
Magdalena Garcia
A 1988 UNO art history graduate, Garcia is the founder and executive director of El Museo Latino in Omaha. When the museum first opened in 1993, it was only one of five museums in the country dedicated to Latino art and culture, with the others being in Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Austin.
Garcia says the museum highlights the creativity and works of Latino artists, while offering educational and exhibit-specific programming that focuses on and celebrates Latino culture. “Art is a universal language,” Garcia says. “I think it’s also a vehicle for opening up communication and conversation, and enhancing understanding.”
Brian York
A 1995 UNO history graduate, York is curator of collections for the Strategic Air Command & Aerospace Museum in Ashland, Nebraska, which is dedicated to preserving and presenting the history and heritage of Strategic Air Command, with items from the Cold War, WW II and the space program.
The museum has more than 25,000 objects in its collection (12% of which is on display), including 34 aircraft displayed inside. Among the collection is an XF-85 Goblin, the smallest jet-propelled fighter ever built, intended to be released from the bomb bay of B-36 bomber. McDonnell Aircraft built two prototypes, but the program was scrapped in 1949. “It was a project that didn’t really work,” York says. “They only built two of them. We have one, and the Air Force Museum has the other.”
Christopher Blue
A 2003 UNO history graduate, Blue is the technical preservation specialist at the Western Historic Trails Center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, which tells the stories of early travelers to Iowa who traversed the Lewis and Clark, Oregon, California and Mormon Trails. “We have the largest collection of Timothy Woodman sculptures west of the Mississippi,” Blue says. “They are approximately anywhere from 18 inches to three feet.”